Tuesday, March 29, 2016

The Entire Online Gig Economy Might Be Mostly Uber

From Real Time Economics:

One of the most-hyped changes to the U.S. labor market has been “the
rise of Uber and its ilk”—companies that use smartphone apps to connect
workers to gig jobs. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is,
of course, Uber, the ride-hailing service that allows people to summon
drivers with an app and pay by the ride. Other startups are attempting
to bring this business model to a wide range of industries.

But aside from Uber, there’s mounting evidence that few companies are doing this successfully. The so-called gig economy barely registers in traditional labor-market data. As documented in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, there’s been a large growth in tenuous work arrangements. But according to new research from Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University,
the growth has taken place largely offline—in traditional jobs and
industries where a growing number of workers are in contract
arrangements.

As part of their new research, Messrs. Katz and Krueger conducted a
large survey of workers, hunting specifically for workers on app-based
online services, and found that only about 0.5% of people worked in the
online gig economy during their survey’s reference week. This
corresponds with a recent finding from the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which studied the bank transactions of one million random bank customers to see how many were earning income from gig platforms.

Their survey found that about 1% of U.S. adults were earning income from
online platforms, but the majority were earning money with sites like
Airbnb and Etsy, where the primary activity is renting housing or
selling products, rather than directly selling their own labor. JPMorgan
calls these “capital platforms” rather than “labor platforms.” The
institute found just under 0.4% of people were actually earning labor
income from gig-economy services....MORE